The challenges associated with boys and reading are focused on such factors as society's lack of focus on literacy skills, parents failings to inspire reading in boys, and internal motivational factors rather than looking at the environments created for reading in and out of school. In this column, several ideas for helping boys develop a…

Digital storytelling has emerged as an innovative practice that allows students deeper engagement with content while encouraging the use of critical thinking and technological skills needed to navigate the ever changing digital terrain of the 21st century. The integration of traditional and new literacy practices is evident throughout the process…

Teaching children to inquire, discuss ideas, and defend thinking about a literary text is a key aim of the common core state standards (CCSS). This article describes how four third-grade, male struggling readers successfully co-constructed meaning during a discussion based reading intervention rooted in philosophical inquiry. Three elements that…

Building on existing research applying app maps (Israelson, 2015), the authors take an ideological orientation to broaden app evaluations and consider participatory literacies, social and communicational practices relevant to children's everyday digitally mediated lives. Drawing from their North American elementary classroom studies on children's…

The Common Core State Standards place unprecedented emphasis on visual text--appropriately so, as visual components are increasingly ubiquitous in many kinds of text. This shift in emphasis requires substantial changes in our teaching. Concepts of print need to be expanded to include concepts of graphics, and specific graphical devices, such as…

Understanding relies on the reader's ability to "read between the lines" and connect textual evidence with their own experience, knowledge and beliefs. The Common Core State Standards highlight the importance of using text-based evidence to develop arguments and support interpretations, including analysis and appreciation of author's craft. In…

The authors examine the growth and impact of guided reading, small group teaching for differentiated instruction in reading that was stimulated by their early publications. Many changes in literacy education have been observed as a result--almost as if educators had a "romance" with guided reading and leveled books. While changes have been…

With the adoption of the Common Core State Standards, curriculum resources are shifting from an emphasis on literary texts to a greater focus on informational texts. Although we need to understand the intention of these new Common Core State Standards, and the important drive toward greater content knowledge for all students, we must be wary of…

Students entering school with limited vocabularies are at a disadvantage compared to classmates with robust knowledge of words and meanings. Teaching a few unrelated words at a time is insufficient for catching these students up with peers and preparing them to comprehend texts they will encounter across the grades. This article presents…

Envisioning oneself as a competent reader is an important first step to reading well. This article describes an intervention that employs drawings coupled with teacher-student dialogue, which sets the stage for strategy learning as a key to word-solving. A process for the interventionist, Title I or any teacher working with students who find…

Based on a first grade teacher's search for approaches to promote successful reading acquisition in her first grade classroom, the authors present a curricular engagement in which the teacher explored using music, specifically singing songs, as a fun and motivating way to accelerate reading progress. The premise is that singing (while at the…

We now have an evidence base that documents that we could teach every child to read by the end of first grade. However, most schools have almost none of the key aspects of instruction that have been available in the research to ensure we achieve this goal. In this paper I argue that this failure is not the result of inadequate funding but rather…

Literacy engagement is critical to the development of reading proficiency. Yet, many students, having had varied and often limited experiences with formal literacy practices, begin schooling in an interstitial state that might more accurately be called "pre-engagement" where though eager to learn, they are unsure how to fully focus on…

Numerous research studies prove that wide reading improves children's comprehension, background knowledge, vocabulary, fluency, and writing. The author, a sixth-grade language arts teacher, describes the classroom conditions and instructional practices that encourage wide reading and increase her students' reading motivation such as choice in…

The quick adoption of iPads into the classroom, coupled with the many apps targeting early literacy skills, offers a new way to build early literacy skills with emergent and beginning readers. However, young children may be more proficient with the technology than with the literacy concepts, and may not be maximizing learning, or even learning at…